Enter the Dragon (1973)

The British secret services convince Shaolin martial arts master Lee (Bruce Lee) to attend a martial arts tournament taking place on the fortress island of international drug lord and all around evildoer Han (Shih Kien). Since Han has disgraced the shaolin martial arts he once studied, and also murdered Lee’s sister (Angela Mao in a short but sweet flashback), there’s quite a bit of motivation provided for our hero to destroy Han’s operation.

Han for his part mostly uses the tournament as a way for recruitment, but at least two of the other martial artists, blaxploitation movie protagonist Williams (Jim Kelly) and roguish adventurer Roper (John Saxon) will turn out to be just as unhappy with their host’s lifestyle as Lee is, and thus make for natural allies.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have to say that Bruce Lee never meant as much to my appreciation of martial arts cinema as he did to other people. Despite his obvious talent, the movie star image first approach he tended to take – and which fit Hollywood much better than it did Hong Kong – always did rub me the wrong way a little.

Which isn’t to say Enter the Dragon is not a fantastically successful attempt at mixing Hong Kong style martial arts, blaxploitation and spy adventure in the Ian Fleming style. This is one of those movies that seem to absolutely embody the sprit of 70s exploitation cinema (which has always been, and will always be, on of the loves of my life). There’s very little here that isn’t enjoyable – from the fights, to the gimmicks, the so wonderfully of its time production design, to the breathing noises so loud, Sonny Chiba heard them over in Japan and decided to make them even more absurd. The film is carried by a spirit of generosity towards its audience, really going all out to not just belong in half a dozen genres or so, but to provide a viewer with everything they could wish for from every single one of them.

And all that from a director like Robert Clouse who usually doesn’t understand pacing, or style, or how to direct action. Well, looked at objectively, for most of the film, it isn’t actually Clouse doing much of the heavy lifting, but the choreography, the production design and a gang of actors that appear to have a great amount of fun; the director for mostly tries not to get in the way of what he has. Which, given most of Clouse’s other films, I can’t help but wish he’d used as an approach more often.

The Forbidden City (2025)

Original title: La città proibita

A mysterious, kung fu fighting young lady we will eventually learn to be called Mei (Liu Yaxi), is smuggled into Italy to be a victim of the flesh trade. Instead of submitting to anything, Mei kicks the ever-loving crap out of her trafficker-captors. Turns out she hasn’t come to be exploited and still make more money than she could hope for at home – the rural areas of China aren’t all charmed – but is looking for her sister Yun (Ye Haijin). Yun for her part came to Italy to earn enough money to pay for the bureaucratic recognition of Mei’s existence. They were both born during the time of of the One Child Policy, and such papers, even once the rule has ended, apparently aren’t cheap. Yun has disappeared, though.

So, armed with her trusty translator app, great kung fu and quite an attitude, Mei has come looking for her sister. It seems Yun has run away with the father of local cook Marcello (Enrico Borello), but, this being the kind of film it is, there’s worse going on, and eventually, Mei and the non-combatant Marcello team up, fall in love and seek vengeance together.

I didn’t expect much of a contemporary Italian martial arts movie starring a Chinese actress with a barely existing CV, but Gabriele Mainetti’s The Forbidden City isn’t just a good martial arts film for an Italian low budget affair but simply a very good martial arts film of a style that’s simply not done anymore at scale. While Liu Yaxi turns out to be a highly capable screen fighter, a fine action actor, and a great on-screen presence.

The action direction is often genuinely wonderful, featuring many a clever use of props, camera work that enhances action instead of obfuscating it, and the mix of controlled movement and poise I often miss in the more MMA-heavy style of fighting contemporary action movies love so dearly.

While the action is sprinkled graciously throughout, this isn’t the kind of martial arts movie that only wants show off the fights – great as they are. This one’s also telling a character-driven story, set in a part of Rome full of immigrants (generally portrayed sympathetically), and puts a lot of work into creating a sense of place and character relationships. This does take place in a community, and so, betrayals and heartbreak do take on a more personal dramatic character than they otherwise would. Handled in this way, the romance isn’t perfunctory as it could easily be in a comparable film, but actually one of the film’s core virtues: acts of violence here follow human emotions, for good and for ill.

I’m not quite as convinced of the film’s recurring comical beats as of the rest of it, but Forbidden City clearly wants to be the full meal kind of martial arts tale, so it’s no surprise humour is an important part of it as well, as is genre tradition. Funny to me or not, the humour does carry as much of a coherent and individual tone as the rest of the film, and Mainetti does manage to balance it, the drama, the romance, and the violence nicely in a way most Western action movies simply aren’t interested in anymore (or, looking at you, Bren Foster, can’t pull off), if they ever were.

I certainly ended the movie’s epilogue with a happy smile on my face – what more can a man ask for?

Three Bad Movies Make A Post: Mommy knows best.

The Mortuary Assistant (2026): Compared to some of the worst new movies I’ve seen in the past couple of months, I can at least praise Jeremiah Kipp’s videogame adaptation for not attempting to paste over the holes in its budget with AI slop – while this isn’t good, at least it has a degree of self respect.

Unfortunately, that’s about all the film has going for it: the photography is flat and ugly in a particularly boring, digital style, the sets look terrible, the plot neither makes sense nor is it told in anything amounting to an even vaguely interesting manner, and consists of all of the clichés of past mortuary horror movies anyway, and the acting is dreadful throughout. There’s a complete lack of imagination on display here I found genuinely dispiriting.

Dolly (2025): Dolly was shot on film and really, really wants you to know it. And shot on film it is indeed, just not shot particularly well, or doing much to demonstrate how its analogue ways are much better than comparable digital photography would be. What’s texture good for when you don’t actually use it?

Being shot on film is also meant as a signifier of this being a throwback to grindhouse days, but there’s nothing the film does actual grindhouse cinema didn’t do better, or deeper, or broader. Even Dolly’s self-conscious nastiness doesn’t quite work, because it is so self-conscious, more concerned with looking like the real thing than simply being it. So it ends up being like a plastic copy of the sort of film it wants to be.

Anatema (2024): I’m genuinely not sure if this mix of religious horror clichés of all times and places directed by Jimina Sabadú is meant to be a comedy, or us just really bad at being a horror movie. In any case, cribbing from movies that aren’t all that great to begin with (hello, most of the Conjuringverse), but doing it badly does not for a decent movie make, even though this, admittedly, has a couple of ideas borrowed from Italian horror (say, The Church) you could still make a fine movie out of. You’d just have to commit to a tone and style, instead of racing through a bunch of greatest hits while actors mug and this viewer sighs.

Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942)

While Fox either didn’t manage to or didn’t want to secure the rights for further Holmes movies, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce deepened their footprints as the characters during a successful series of radio plays in the roles. So it makes a lot of sense that Universal studios, who eventually managed to make a deal with the Doyle estate, then went to that particular well and hired the men for their own cycle of Holmes movies.

These films weren’t given the full studio budget treatment of Fox’s Holmes films, however, but were strictly meant for the B slot of any given cinematic performance, leading to shorter and cheaper films made by the B-movie arm of Universal’s operation. On the plus side, Universal’s B arm did have better directors than the guys Fox put on their Holmes films.

As another, apparently still quite contentious in certain Holmes purist circles to this day, cost-cutting measure, the Universal films put Holmes into the present day, though a version of the present day that is drenched in shadows and fog more often than not. Because it was 1942, Universal also decided to start the films off as war propaganda. So this first outing finds Holmes thwarting a Lord Haw-Haw style Nazi radio propagandist who commands his spy minions to commit some rather spectacular (for the budget) acts of sabotage. Holmes ropes in the service of a thinly-coded prostitute (Evelyn Ankers) who convinces parts of the Underworld to do their patriotic duty with a really rather effective speech to counter the Nazi scum.

While the propagandist elements here can feel to be laid on rather thick (this certainly isn’t a Powell/Pressburger joint), I find myself rather taken with this aspect of the film. But then, if ever there was a reason for the people of Britain to be proudly patriotic, it was how they held out against Nazi Germany when the Americans here singing their praises were still twiddling their thumbs. And frankly, who else would you have Sherlock Holmes fight in 1942?

The film, directed by John Rawlins, is a nice little piece of pulpy entertainment, making moody use of Universal’s standing sets, and a script that’s just on the right side of overstuffed, with some cheap but cheerful action set-pieces, rousing speeches – Anker in particular really gives her all there – and a well-developed sense of the shadow-drenched mood I tend to hope for in Holmes media whenever it leaves the drawing room. The cast is fine, the villains dastardly, and I even didn’t mind the idiot version of Watson too much this time.

A Couple of Weeks Off

In yet another bid for keeping things nailbitingly exciting around here, I’ll take a couple of weeks off from posting.

What goes for normal service around here will resume on the 24th of May. If you can’t live without my movie opinions – I certainly can’t – you can still witness me give inexcusable star ratings to movies over on Letterboxd.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

Following Fox’s first Holmes movie with the Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce double act rather quickly, this second movie is already the end of the short Fox cycle featuring these two. The studio apparently had problems wrangling the rights for further movies out of the Doyle estate, and perhaps not as much interest in continuing the series anyway.

Probably making negotiations less important for the studio that this film was neither much loved by the studio bosses nor – apparently – audiences, so fighting Adrian Doyle might not have been worth it to them in any case.

The Adventures doesn’t attempt to adapt any particular Holmes tale, but spins a complicated yarn about a plot of Professor Moriarty (who is much more common in adaptations than in the canon, and here played by the typically fun George Zucco) to thwart and humiliate Holmes and get rich in the process.

Not being a studio boss or a 1939 audience, I prefer this second Fox Holmes to the Hound. The plot is more lively, Alfred L. Werker’s direction is workmanlike but at least effective and from time to time even atmospheric, and Rathbone and Bruce really have gotten a grip on the character they are never really going to lose for as long as they will continue to play these characters (as much as I loathe Watson as an idiot, but you know that already). Unlike in the first movie, there’s also at least one memorable part among the younger actors surrounding our heroes – Ida Lupino (early in her career here) imbues her theoretically typical heiress in distress with as much personality and backbone as she can get away with, which does wonders for much of the plot she is involved in.

This – like most of Hollywood Holmes – is very much Holmes in pulp mode, so expect as much action as ratiocination, and delightful moments like the scene in which Moriarty’s butler has forgotten to water the man’s beloved plants and faces the ensuing threats of death and doom with the most movie butlerish face ever encountered. It is all very good fun. Apart from the actual jokes, of course, but that’s par for the course.

Express Train (1967)

Aoki (Kiyoshi Atsumi) is the proud, veteran conductor of an express sleeper train. At the time, this didn’t mean he’d just be checking tickets, but is actually commanding the small army of personnel on the train and shooting all kinds of trouble.

Aoki does so with a mixture of warmth, sternness, and the everyman awkwardness Atsumi is so good at portraying. He’s too self-serious not to be always at least a little ridiculous but he’s also kind and compassionate to a fault, so it’s impossible not to be kindly disposed towards him even if he’s being silly or mildly embarrassing.

In this first of four Train movies with Atsumi produced by Toei, he has to take care of passengers like a child with a dangerous heart problem, a somewhat rowdy drunk ladies’ party, as well as a pregnant passenger who will of course give birth on board of the train.

He’s also going to fall in love again with a woman (Yoshiko Sakuma) he developed a crush on when she was just a late teenage passenger on another line – this being a Japanese move from the 60s, that’s not to be read as anything creepy in the world of the movie. Now very much grown up, her marriage is on the skids, and Aoki’s own marriage isn’t terribly satisfying. Of course, she’s also completely unreachable as a realistic romantic prospect for Aoki.

And if all of this sounds rather a lot like a train-based predecessor to the long, long, very long-running Tora-san/It’s Hard to be a Man series Atsumi would star in for Shochiku starting some years later, apparently every single person watching this – including me – agrees. This is the absolute blueprint of the sort of thing Atsumi would go on to play and be on screen in the future. There are of course some differences here – despite being a bit of a fool sometimes, Aoki is actually pretty good at his job, and feels at least more grown up than Tora will do. He also doesn’t have episodes of lashing out at everyone around him.

Masaharu Segawa directs with an appropriate sense of gentleness – the tone is gentle, the humour is gentle, and there’s an air of day-to-day kindness here that does smile at human folly more than damn it, using the train and its conductor as a model of a late 60s Japan that never quite was but that looks like a place I’d rather like to live.

Kanto Street Peddlers: Clan Violent Loyalty (1970)

After having spent only a couple of years behind bars for his role in the climax of the first movie, Bunta Sugawara now roams Japan in this second movie of the street peddling focussed ninkyo eiga series to keep out of Tokyo trouble.

As will surprise nobody who ever watched a ninkyo eiga or two, Bunta soon falls in with group of deeply honourable street peddling yakuza who control an important festival site, but are beleaguered by the intrigues and occasional casual violence of a gang of proper baddy yakuza who want to get at that turf and its riches by any means necessary.

This sequel was again directed by Norifumi Suzuki, who spent a lot of his time in the ninkyo realm before he found his true calling in pinky violence and dubious comedy.

Here we find the director pulling his preferred comedy shenanigans back for much of the film beyond a couple of comical interludes. Instead he concentrates on melodrama and bad yakuza nastiness (even in the less extreme ninkyo eiga variant of the yakuza movie, things could get a bit unpleasant at this point in time, as long as only the villains were doing the really bad stuff). Despite some inelegant shuffling out of and into the movie of characters – some actors probably shot another movie for Toei in parallel, or ten – the film is rather more focussed than its predecessor. This provides Suzuki with opportunity to put more effort into creating more complex character relations and go deeper into the politics of the street peddler world. All this is then used to make the melodrama more intense once the shit hits the fan, until everything culminates in the expected beautiful bloodbath.

That climax isn’t quite as wonderfully done as the one in the first Kanto Street Peddlers, though Suzuki still puts a lot of effort into creating an energetic fight that doesn’t use the standard by the book camera set-ups or blocking of such scenes. In general, Suzuki appears very interested in using all kinds of tricks to make the genre standards Seiko Shimura’s script goes through visually memorable and through this emotionally involving. This works rather well for the movie, and also demonstrates a side of the directors that’s easy to overlook when he’s throwing naked female wrestlers and pratfalls at the camera: he’s genuinely good at the quiet emotional moments, and knows how to provide the Toei stable of thespians with openings to really strut their stuff. As it usually goes when a director does this, they repay him with giving a little extra.

Nachtschatten (1972)

Businessman Jan (John van Dreelen) stumbles upon a lonely house belonging to a village in the Lüneburger Heide (heath/moorland in Germany’s Lower Saxony). He feels drawn to the woman living there, Elena Berg (Elke Haltaufderheide), for she’s mysterious, seems in turn vaguely seductive and vaguely defensive, and speaks mostly in vague sentences while using the long, empty stares with lack of eye contact beloved of German filmmaking. A habit Jan shares, incidentally.

Elena wants to sell her house, apparently, and Jan might be interested in buying it, but once it comes to inquiries about concrete details like a price, vagueness sets in again. Jan is also interested in getting into Elena’s pants in the dubious ways beloved of 70s toxic masculinity. She keeps rebuffing him, but she also appears to want him to stay with her for as long as possible and makes many an oblique remark about her brother (wherever he is), death, and love.

Niklaus Schilling’s Nachtschatten – which translates so nicely to “Nightshade” it even keeps its ambiguity - is one among the very manageable number of German sort of arthouse horror movies. Neither the Autorenfilm (West Germany’s version of arthouse) nor the country’s movies made for an actual audience were very keen on delving into Germany’s deep well of the fantastical, so there’s no coherent tradition of this kind of filmmaking here post World War II, and thus the few films of the kind that were somehow made all feel somewhat disconnected from each other.

By virtue of the leaden pacing and disconnected acting style dominating the Autorenfilm, and in something of an ironic twist, Nachtschatten feels related to the kind of film Jess Franco or Jean Rollin were making, though without these directors’ sense of personal obsessions, and only a very mild kind of eroticism instead of full-on obsessive kink. It does manage to feel languid rather than stodgy for most of its running time, though, and from time to time, its slowness and unwillingness to say anything directly if it can instead have a character stare into empty air for a bit takes on a quality of poetic, dreamy unreality I’m unsure Schilling was actually going for.

Visually, this is a curious mix of the Gothically coded – the Heide is about as gothic as my part of Germany gets – and drab 70s interiors shot as if the director were willing them into becoming something more fantastical, dream sequences and characters that go through their daily life as if they were dreams – until it becomes some stiff German art business for a couple of scenes again.

It’s certainly an interesting effort, at least halfway towards becoming something special.